Lord & Taylor, Fifth Ave. 39th St., Social Service for Employees, Interior, Classroom. Source: Museum of the City of New York

By Sandra Roff“Mr. Selfridge” and “The Paradise” are two recent PBS series that dramatize working in the new department stores established in Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Across the Atlantic, department stores were similarly enjoying success with stores opening and expanding to meet the demands of consumers. However, it was not just the sale of material goods to consumers that took place in these stores, but also activities that seemed to benefit employees. Forward-thinking employers believed they had a responsibility to provide for the welfare of their employees, whether it was for medical care, recreation, or even schooling: a movement known as Industrial Paternalism.

One never knows where a family heirloom will lead. Brooklyn’s Renaissancebegan with a cultural artifact that Italian Renaissance scholar Melissa Meriam Bullard’s mother inherited from a distant cousin: a portrait of Luther Boynton Wyman (1804-79), a forgotten shipping merchant for Liverpool’s Black Ball Line, long-time resident of Brooklyn Heights, and “guiding hand” in the founding of the “arts-friendly community” along Montague Street during the 1850s and 1860s (with the Academy of Music, now “BAM,” as Brooklyn’s cultural center).​​Bullard argues that Wyman and other members of Brooklyn’s business elite, inspired by William Roscoe, the "Lorenzo de' Medici of Liverpool," exemplify the ways in which “Atlantic commercial networks [facilitated] collaborative patronage of culture, and civic pride [that] flowed together around the arts.” She suggests that noblesse oblige as much as competition with Manhattan motivated Brooklyn’s “haut-bourgeois families” to employ their private wealth to sustain the arts as Brooklyn emerged as the third-largest independent city in the United States. Rather than proposing the creation of public institutions, Brooklyn’s elite employed the Medici merchant patronage model to found the city’s first reading rooms and musical, artistic, and horticultural societies to “serve as uplifting examples to their grubby and untutored urban neighbors.” Unfortunately, the Civil War disrupted Brooklyn’s Renaissance; and early success could not withstand the changes and divisions that the Gilded Age engendered. As a result, Brooklyn’s rapid but short-lived cultural renaissance remained lost to history — until Bullard followed Luther Wyman’s trail from rural Massachusetts to Brooklyn.

By Atiba PertillaWilliam Allen Butler, Jr., the founder of downtown Manhattan’s Lawyers Club, would later explain that its creation was inspired by a disturbing encounter. One afternoon in the 1880s, he went out for lunch with his father and partner, William Allen Butler, Sr.—a respected corporate lawyer, son of a former U.S. Attorney General, and co-founder of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. The restaurant was crowded, but moments later an office boy from his law firm finished lunch and “my respected father occup[ied] that same stool to order a slice of roast beef.”

By Kate Elizabeth BrownHamilton’s bustling practice exemplified a fundamental truth about marine insurance in American port cities like New York: the persistence of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars made the legalities of insurance contracts, and the extensive maritime commerce they underwrote, particularly pressing and uncertain for the young republic.

King Cotton sustained a powerful connection between the antebellum South and New York City, one that expanded and intensified the demand for slavery.[1] Gotham’s well-known cotton ties, however, have long overshadowed another cross-regional bond sealed by the city's appetite for lucrative commodities: Dixie's state lotteries.

So much of the public face of Manhattan -— the walls of its streets —- is brick or stone that it is often an effort to remember that behind a great many of the older masonry exteriors is an interior built almost entirely of wood. Even the famous brownstones are for the most part brick and wood structures faced with stone. Some 80% of the nearly 150,000 buildings that were put up on the island in its “long” 19th century, 1790–1910, were of what came to be called “ordinary” construction: load-bearing exterior walls of brick supporting an interior structure of timber joists, wooden floors, wooden rafters supporting wood-sheathed roofs, wood-framed interior partitions, wooden furring and laths, wooden staircases, interior and exterior doors, doorway and window frames, and a whole miscellany of wooden moldings and other fittings.

Letter of November 4, 1626, from Peter Schagen in Amsterdam to the States-General in The Hague, reporting the arrival the previous day of the West India Company ship Arms of Amsterdam with news of the purchase of Manhattan.

By Richard Howe

Christus is goed maar handel is beter. Christ is good but trade is better.- 17th century Dutch Proverb

The extant evidence for the Dutch purchase of Manhattan is scant, indirect, and circumstantial. Surviving West India Company documents show that sometime in January, 1625, and again on April 22, 1625, the company authorized —- but did not require -— the provisional director of its New Netherland colony, Willem Verhulst, to make such a purchase. A letter sent from Amsterdam to the States-General of the United Netherlands in The Hague on November 5, 1626, reported the news that “they” had purchased the island “for the value of 60 guilders” (currently about $1,000). Peter Stuyvesant, who was at least in a position to know, wrote -— probably in 1649 -— that the early colonists had made many such purchases, Manhattan and Staten Island among them. The deed for Staten Island survives, but not the deed for Manhattan. All in all it’s not much to go on; nevertheless, the scholarly consensus is that the purchase did take place, probably by Peter Minuit, and most likely in mid-May, 1626.

We have been documenting New York City’s mom-and-pop storefronts for ten years. Astoundingly, almost one-half of the stores that we photographed have disappeared. This is a trend we couldn’t help noticing and what set this project in motion. We witnessed first hand the alarming rate at which the shops were disappearing, and decided to preserve what remained.

By Alan Solomon The ups and downs, scams and swindles, building booms and busts, the wisdom and folly of New York City’s business district. It was all happening in the early 19th century, and recounted in a semi-humorous novella of 1834, The Perils of Pearl Street: and a Taste of the Dangers of Wall Street by A Late Merchant (Asa Green) – a quintessential New York tale of aspiration and redemption (of sorts). The Sesquicentennial offers a time to reﬂect on this heritage.